(Scoop Weekly, by Hsu Wei-chen) An artist given to reflection and close observation, Lo Chan Peng draws his paintings from the things around him. In 2019, with a single work, The Garden of Eve, he took part in a group exhibition at Arcadia Contemporary in Los Angeles, showing alongside internationally known artists and entering the international art market with that one painting, to considerable notice.

For Lo, painting surpasses language and must be able to ‘communicate’; he turned to the children of the Syrian war as a way of addressing the shared spirit of the age. His path began with national honours such as the Union Art New Artist Award and the Chi Mei Art Award, and he has collaborated with the band Mayday on the concept album Herstory as its principal visual artist. By 2019 he had just closed his solo exhibition “Mondo Tondo” at Arcadia and was taking part in “The Beauty of Precision — Taiwan Hyperrealism” at the Chi Mei Museum, Tainan, and “Ode to Taiwan” at the Tainan Art Museum.

The Garden of Eve draws on the Book of Genesis: tempted by the serpent, Eve eats the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and at once, aware of her nakedness, feels shame. For Lo, that instant of shame is perhaps the moment a pure life steps into the ‘worldly’ — a world that has the knowledge to tell good from evil, but not necessarily wisdom. To Western viewers who know the story well, the work reads at a glance, and it drew warm interest throughout the exhibition.